


Buried Remembrances

by MelissaMelody



Category: Contact - Carl Sagan
Genre: Gen, Mentions of canon characters - Freeform, NON MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH, granny with a dirty mouth, post-canon fanfiction, the story but just to the left
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:07:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22036789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelissaMelody/pseuds/MelissaMelody
Summary: “Do you remember the message, Gran?”My wife laughed a little and my brother and his husband rolled their eyes as we settled in for the evening. My mother wasn’t frail yet, but she had been alive for long enough that the kids thought she would be eternal.“Of course I do, little ones,” my mother said, settling into her favorite chair. Minnie was the only one still small enough to sit on the chair with her, and the other kids settled around her, even Charlotte and Gray despite their proud status as high schoolers. “I was in middle school when the President announced the signal.”
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	Buried Remembrances

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for a SciFi lit midterm. We had just read Contact and one of the options was to literally write fanfiction. So I did. 
> 
> Enjoy!

“Do you remember the message, Gran?”

My wife laughed a little and my brother and his husband rolled their eyes as we settled in for the evening. My mother wasn’t frail yet, but she had been alive for long enough that the kids thought she would be eternal. 

“Of course I do, little ones,” my mother said, settling into her favorite chair. Minnie was the only one still small enough to sit on the chair with her, and the other kids settled around her, even Charlotte and Gray despite their proud status as high schoolers. “I was in middle school when the President announced the signal.”

“No way!” Karl said, bouncing on his knees right in front of her. 

“Yes way!” my mother retorted. “I was in Kansas, and I remember my teacher turning on the radio in our old room so we could hear the president. He always did that for anything from the government, but that was the first time I ever listened.”

“Did you ever hear Arroway?” Charlotte asked. 

“Not then, no,” my mother said. “She didn’t really speak much herself.”

“Did you ever meet her?” Mickey asked, a ball of energy as always.

“No, but do you know who did?” my mother had the attention of every child and grandchild. I looked at my brother, and he returned with just a look of confusion.

“Who?” Minnie asked.

“My father.”

***

My mother had never liked all of the moving around that the family did before my father finally went and took a course that let him be a specialist engineer. Between that and my mother being the librarian at the town library they could have one house in one town for once, and my father could travel around if they paid him enough to, but we all stopped moving. I grew up in that house in the middle of Kansas and never thought I would leave. 

That day the President made her announcement most of that tiny town went to church. Some of them for the first time in all their lives, but our family didn’t. Instead my older brother - the one you were named for Karl - went and got the newest astronomy book from the library and brought it home and we all looked for Vega. I remember Mom being suspicious of that book and checking it in the cover to find out that is was twenty years old and the whole conniption she threw about that! The library had a new set of astronomical texts by the end of the month and she kept them up to date, but that night Dad let us use his teletype to ask questions to the answers line. We stayed up well past our bedtimes, but it seemed so unimportant at the time. There was a message from space, from someone other than us on our little planet in the great big universe, a sign that we weren’t alone.

It was years before anything really changed, mind you. Dad didn’t pull the lot of us up by our roots until I was in high school. But oh we watched, we were the only family in that town that didn’t think that it was a message from God, or the Devil, or the end of all days. Oh, we were the only people who listened to what the scientists had to say in that little hell hole - Louisa, Brent, both of you know that I don’t lie about what that town was like and I won’t apologize for that so stop gasping like those damned church women - anyways, everyone else listened to Billy Jo Rankin and the other TV pastors, those heralds of hell and brimstone. That lot kept trying to prove that there wasn’t anything in the world that the bible didn’t directly talk about, but all those Fundamentalists got what was coming for them, in the end, didn’t they? Yes, you all keep laughing about that. 

I did have a few neighbors who went down to the telescope after that announcement. What was that place called, you all just watched a documentary on the TV, didn’t you? Ah, yeah, Argus. Had a few neighbors go all the way down to Argus. One of them was a friend of mine, Ginny. She called up a few times, told us about how crazy it all was down there, living in the desert. The last time she called was to tell us that she was gonna be back in town for a few days, and she was for just long enough for her granny to pack up her and the rest of her siblings and cart them off somewhere else. I didn’t hear from her again, but her parents came back to that town just before we left. 

Nothing really changed about the lives of any of us until Dad decided that he wanted to take us all with him to Wyoming - yes Gray, he moved us to Machine, Wyoming. We went so that he could help put the Machine together, so we could be there at that momentous time. I finished high school in a ramshackle building put up just to contain the children that got brought along and staffed by the spouses and parents of people working in the complex. Mom never did like that that was where me and Johnny finished up our schooling, and I never liked it much either given how behind I was in college even though I got in because of where all of my post stamps came from, but Dad convinced her. 

‘It will be history!’ - Oh, sorry Minnie, you hold on now, your great-grandpa never held still if he didn’t have to and I have to wave my arms around to get that right, now hang on, ahem - ‘Our kids will see history! They’ll be right there for it, for an opportunity that comes once in a species existence!’ Ah, I miss that old fart. Louisa, I called your father that too until he needed a worse nickname, so shush, I’m not corrupting them. He was proud of working there, proud of having been a part of that great leap of knowledge and leaving some of his fingerprints among all of those of the others who worked there too towards that great and brilliant achievement. 

What about her? Oh yes, Mom caved. She was a librarian, you remember, and she loved having everybody learning everything they could. She set up the local library for Machine, Wyoming in our basement with donated books from just about everyone on any subject, though it really worked out to just three sections, Children’s books, Romance, and outdated Technical manuals. Facilitated the sharing of other materials for the rest of the city too since she was the only civilian with library science training in the whole town. 

Mickey, you are always so impatient with the story. Yes, my father did meet Dr. Eleanor Arroway. She came to see the Machine in Wyoming with the first Envoy that the President picked out, that was, oh heck who was that - Yes, David Drumlin that’s who it was, thank you, Gracie. She came with him to see the Machine being put together. 

What? Yes, Gray, that’s right, the machine that got used was the extra one in Japan. Was what happened in Machine, Wyoming talked about in that documentary of yours? Oh of course not, the revisionist bastards. Tell you all about Machine, Wyoming but not why it was the Hokkaido Machine that got used. What was it that they told you about Wyoming?

What?

Oh, bah. What a load of horse shit. If that was true I swear your great-grandpa would be alive and kicking today instead of buried under a block of lead. No, they couldn’t use the Machine in Wyoming because it was sabotaged. 

***

I remember looking at my mother like she was crazy. Sabotage? I’d never heard of such a thing happening up at Machine, Wyoming. Then again, I’d never heard of my mother being  _ in  _ Machine, Wyoming either. Brent looked at me in shock.

“Lou, you ever hear any of this?”

“Mom being in Wyoming, or the sabotage?”

“All of it!”

“No, no I haven’t.”

“What do the two of you mean?” my mother said. “I know I’ve never really told you this story but you two never asked either. Didn’t you think it was weird that everyone else had grandparents and you didn’t?”

“What happened to Grandpa?” Brent asked.

“It was that sabotage,” my mother said, sitting up straight in her chair and settling Minnie on her knee again. “It was that sabotage that killed him in the end, same as Dr. Arroway.”

If she hadn’t had our attention before, she sure as hell had it now.

***

It was the day that Arroway and Drumlin and that one other guy came to see the Machine. Yes, Charlotte? Valerian, yes, him. There was a great big convoy of governmental vehicles right up the main road to the facility. That’s what those astronomers had to drive around in all the time then, it was too dangerous for them to drive themselves, and their time was too important to relearn how to drive apparently. I remember climbing onto the roof of the grocery store with my friends to see the convoy. It wasn’t much, but it was about as good as seeing the President go by, and there have been a lot more Presidents than there have been Envoys. 

Dad told me what they were doing up there that day a little bit later. They were setting the Erbium dowels in this other thing, a big step with lots of parts that would show some sign of success in what the whole lot of them were doing. Dad met Arroway before they started with the dowels, shook her hand for a second as they breezed by through some ceremonial introductions of the people that had been working on the thing. He shook Valerian and Drumlin’s hands too, but it was Arroway he always talked about later.

Nearly everything at that time hinged on that moment with the dowels, that’s why the Envoy was coming to see it. The thing had to work. Everyone was in the facility to see that getting put together for the first time, and the whole town knew it too even if we weren’t supposed to. But as soon as those dowels touched that other thing it just all went up in smoke.

That blast, oh we could feel that blast out in the streets. I was still up on the roof of the grocery when it went off and it knocked me down. Got a nasty scrape on my chin but I didn’t even realize until after we got to the hospital for Dad and a nurse started fussing over me. I just remember sitting up and looking towards the facility and seeing great billowing smoke coming up from it. Right then I thought that I needed to go home and get Mom. Johnny and all the rest had already left to go live their lives and it was just me and Mom with Dad and I knew I had to get her and get to the facility. I ran and ran and ran, all the way home all I could feel was air burning in my lungs, then we were in the car and the radio said to go straight to the hospital so we did, and we told the staff Dad’s name and hours later we were taken to him and his legs and an arm were just crushed. They said he’d gotten caught under part of the superstructure for the Machine. He told me about it once, how he was watching and hoping for everything to go right then it didn’t and he was on the floor under that scaffolding with four other people. 

It was days and days and days before everything settled. Drumlin died that day, and Valerian got hurt, but Eleanor Arroway was fine, just fine. She would go then, if another Machine could be made.

Yes, yes it was sabotage. That’s what the news reports could say a few days later. Explosives packed into the bottom of some of the dowels that had been made in Ohio. It got covered up quick, they didn’t want anybody knowing that there were still people against building the Machine anywhere close to the production of it, but there were. The Russian one got extra security and checks before the dowels went into that one, but something else went wrong, I don’t remember, but they ended up using the one in Hokkaido on December 31st, 1999. 

No, Lou, the crushing isn’t what killed your grandfather. He died from that radiation that ended up stuck in everybody’s bodies from interacting with the Machine, that same stuff that killed Arroway and the rest of the Envoys. Almost everyone who worked on it ended up dying from that poisoning. Yes, the people who stayed close got sick too. I left for college that year, didn’t stay around long and as much as it hurts me to admit it I couldn’t stay with him, I couldn’t watch him try to come back from that pain and fight to move his fingers and toes. So I got spared that particular ailment, but my mother died from it too, spending almost the rest of her life taking care of him. It was that radiation nobody could detect, and it was decades before the doctors figured out that having open wounds around it made it all worse.

It was the sabotage that killed him. That was how he got enough of that radiation to die before seventy, and Mom before eighty. What now? Oh, I’m ninety-four, Minnie, and I’m not gonna go anywhere anytime soon.

***

Brent and I sat up with our partners long into the night after putting the kids to bed and making sure Mom was settled. The four of us kept trying to parse what we had been taught in school with what she had told us, and just about none of it made sense in the end. 

The next day was normal, because why should it be anything but normal? Mom was spry and led the children on a scavenger hunt, deputizing Charlotte and Gray as team captains to get them to play too. That day had good weather, and Thomas didn’t burn the cooking for once, and Gracie rescued the rest of it as usual. But that ordinary day turned into one of strangeness. It started with the local evening news being co-opted for a national broadcast.

_ “Palmer Joss died last week, as is well reported around the world. What has been revealed tonight is a signed and dated copy of a transcript written by Dr. Eleanor Arroway was among his belongings, and his will states that what has been written there is to be shared with the world. The transcript has already been uploaded online, but the most important thing to know about this document is this: The Five did go to Vega, they did meet aliens, they brought back the knowledge that we are far from alone in the universe, and they were told to say absolutely nothing.” _

That, of course, was just the beginning of it.


End file.
